>> thanks to my colleagues for the tips. check out the debate live from hofstra university this tuesday. our coverage starting here at 7:00 p.m. eastern and you can send me questions about the debate. go to cnnireport.com/crowley to submit your questions now. thanks for watching us on "state of the union". "fareed zakaria gps" is here for our viewers in the united states. this is gps, the global public square. welcome to all of you in the united states and around the world. i'm fareed zakaria. on monday mitt romney set out his foreign policy plank. in eight days mitt romney and president obama will debate foreign affairs. we will ask the terrific panel what to make of romney's foreign policy. next up, "argo," the amazing little known story of six americans who actually escaped from the embassy in tehran in 1979 and eventually got out of

the country. i'll talk to the man at the cia who masterminded the operation. ben affleck plays him on the big screen, but you get the real version with us. finally, drew foust, the president of harvard, on how the civil war changed america. also, do you feel guilty take dagg off from work? don't. it's probably good for your country. i'll explain. but first here's my take. recently intelligence squared a feisty forum in new york debated the proposition better elected islamists than dictators, referring to the choices confronting america in the middle east. the lead speaker for the proposition was a prominent conservative intellectual. and the lead speaker against the proposition was a prominent conservative intellectual. that's a reflection of the state of conservative thought on the most dramatic events sweeping the world. mitt romney's foreign policy speech sounded alarms about the

turmoil in the region, but he, too, seemed somewhat unsure which side hoe would be on. on the one hand you have commentators like the romney adviser like john bolton and the tv anchor sean hannity who believe thad the obama administration should have tried to keep hosni mubarak in power in egypt. he called it the rice of violence, hate, islamic extremism, madness, and death. on the other hand you have conservative policy makers who have celebrated the fall of arab tear tyrannies. this debate is important. over the next few decades the middle east could see the rise of a ill liberal democracies, countries with elections before few individual rights or it could see a graduation toward plurmism and the rule of law but this discussion is being super seeded by a visceral reaction to

islam as hannity suggests that is nigh never accurate nor is helpful in understanding what is happening on the ground. the heart of the problem in the arab world is that the old order was highly unstable. repressive regimes like the one in eject had created over the decades extreme opposition movements. that opposition often became violent and it attacked america for supporting these dictatorships. in other words, america's support for mubarak or other regimes fueled the anti-american terrorist groups that then attacked us on 9/11. al qaeda understands that if the arab world demock kra tiezs, it loses the core of its i ideological ideal. they condemn the brother hooed's decision to support and participate. so while we might despair over a particular state policy from the

new arab regimes, they have produced elected leaders with real legitimacy and these leaders do denounce al qaeda and they do try in their own way to reconcile islam and democracy. should we encourage that or should we oppose them? that's why romney in the end proposes that we work with the elected governments of libya and egypt and try to push them in the right direction. now, there is one place where a resolutely secular dictatorship, one that has battled islam for decades is in trouble and it's in trouble from an opposition move management that has within it radical islamic forces. so those who truly believe it is better to back secular dictators than gamble on the prospects of political islam should be supporting the regime of bashar al assad in syria. for more on this, read my column in "the washington post." there's a link on

cnn.com/fareed. and let's get started. -- captions by vitac -- www.vitac.com we will leave it to ores to analyze the ups and downs of the vice-presidential debate. we'll get to the main course. what to make of mitt romney's speech this week, what to make of the arab spring and the candidates' responses to it. joining me now are bill keller, temperature former executive erd tore of "new york times" now an op-ed columnist for the baker. diane frn foreign defense stois at aei, brett stevens, "the wall street journal's" jurial and the public policy of the national university of singapore. welcome back to all of you. bill, what did you make of what was billed as romney's major foreign policy address? >> the interesting thing to me was when you strip away the rhett rinne and the high-minded

talk about leadership, he's not that different from obama and on a couple of points it seemed to me he moved a little closer to president obama, play-by-play analogous to the way he moved to the middle on domestic policy in the first debate. >> diane, you wrote an article in the op-ed times calling him the kind of stark substantive contrast or at least a vision, wasn't so clear it was a contrast. what did you think of it? did he deliver for you in. >> i thought he delivered to me up to a point. i think he made a lot of effort to be more pacific than he has. you know, the campaign on foreign policy has really been plagued by a certain vagueness in this obama has run on his record and romney has run as not obama but none of it has any real texture to it. i think he did a good job of adding i to it in certain areas. i think as bill said in some there was a surprising contrast with obama, particularly on iran. he merely said he would be better on sanctions.

and that's not -- that's not really much of a contrast, so, yes, good, good on certain issues, good on russia, good on the issue of the arab spring, i thought, quite specific. but on the question of iran, perhaps a little more vague than i would have liked. >> i think we're looking at this at the wrong way. it's not a policy speech. it was a political speech. it was a way of mitt romney saying i'm mitt romney, i have some ideas on foreign policy. let's face it, it's almost like a proverbial curse. the gods will laugh at you. president obama was going to close guantanamo within a year of his presidency. president bush came in offering a humbler foreign policy. president obama came in and said i'm going to deal with the butcher of belgrade and he did but not before. i think we need to look alt

foreign pronouncements from either candidate with a certain grade of salt. this was tonal. it's like saying do you prefer chocolate or vanilla. >> what does it look like from halfway across the world? >> well, i agree with brett. this is for election purposes, for the domestic audience, but if you look at it from the outside there's a sense of incredit that merge believes you can be a white knight and make countries overseas and save them. iraq, afghanistan, now libya. i think the era where america could go out and change the world, it's ending. a much more realistic appreciatiappreciat appreciation of the difficults of the world would be better. >> you raised the arab spring. that was rhetorically the most stark contrast. the essential argument was, you know, you have these huge changes taking place around in

the arab world and obama is watching them passively rather than actively shaping them. do you think that -- you know, is that a -- is there something the united states could do that would more actively change what's going on in the middle east in a they would be beneficial to them or to us? >> it's not that we can make the egyptians different, make him successful or fail. it's that insofar as our interests are concerned, we can at least be mindful of the fact there's been a change there. we have a massive aide program in egypt. if it's an aide program that's going to continue willy nilly because of camp david, okay, let's admit that that's what it's all about if it's an furthering our own values and promoting what we believe is beneficial, health care. women's rights, economic reform. then we need to stop a second and say who are we giving money to? how are we spending it?

what are we doing? we should do that every time the government changes. that's one of the things romney talked about that actually made sense, not in a partisan way or a muslim brotherhood is coming way. i think we saw that with libya. we turned our back. you're done, not our fight, thank you very much, good-bye. >> we're going to have to take a break. when we come back, more of the romney foreign policy. we're going to ask why he stopped bashing china when we come back. [ male announcer ] citi turns 200 this year. in that time there've been some good days. and some difficult ones. but, through it all, we've persevered, supporting some of the biggest ideas in modern history. so why should our anniversary matter to you? because for 200 years, we've been helping ideas move

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and we're back. do you think it's fair to say as i do that the conservatives are split on, you know, kind of fundamentally how to deal with the arab spring? >> i've been lally joking that i've become a pay leo neocon and my skepticism is for purely democratic movements. there is -- i think the split is actually fairly cosmetic and there's a way to heal this rift if it needs healing, which is that the united states should be and should have been, by the way, long ago, much more actively supporting reform with our friends and supporting regime change with our enemies. >> let me press you on that because to be fair there was an eight-year period called the bush administration where to be fair to bush he tried and that

was very tough go get mubarak to reform and the saudis. it sounds like a good idea. >> that was a two-year or three-year administration that began with the fall of saddam and ended when hamas won the parliament election in 2006 and then let's face it. late bush administration was kind of a classic real list administration dealing with mubarak. we had an ambassador there who would extoll mubarak at every turn. so that was actually a great missed opportunity for the united states to really start pushing the mubarak regime maybe once its succeeded but it was at least worth a try to say your options are good. you're nothing going to be able to perpetuate this and you need to move progressively toward reform. >> bill, how does this affect you? >> what should we do to encourage the guy the head of

egypt, morsi, to honor his better angels? you know, he's clearly fumbling for a way to do that, you know. he got criticize add lot for going to tehran, but he went to tehran and criticized the butchers in syria. he got criticized for not protecting our embassy butter but he did protect our embassy in cairo. yes, he should be doing all those sorts of things we used to call nation building but we should also, you know, using the carrots and occasionally the sticks to award and even courage that kind of behavior. >> let me pick up on one thing you said. you brought this up. what can the united states do. united states can impose a no-fly zone over syria or western syria, precisely the kind we imposed over boss nia i the 1990s. there was one line in mitt romney's speech that stayed with me. we will not forget that you've

forgotten about us. think that's important. there are ways in which we can use american power very effectively and very 40sfully, so i think there are things we can do to tilt the balance in favor of our interest. >> let's talk about this. let's stay on syria for a little bit because i mean i would love to see us do more to help us get rid of the assad regime. i guess -- i don't know, but i would i guess that if, you know, hillary clinton could figure out a way to get surface to air-missile into the hands of the rebels that they wouldn't have later be used to shoot down american passenger liners she would do that and the obama administration would do that. bit if they could find a way to impose a no-fly zone without massive casualties because syria's more complicated than a military target than libya was where all the anti-aircraft was around the coastline, not in huge population centers. you know.

i think it's easy to which for those things but harder do them i want to emphasize this is not the end of history moment. this is the return of history moment. the islamic world has been passive for 200 years. it is waking up it. is remake itself. it will make itself in its own invention. at the end of the day, much as i wish like all of you that we could go in there like a white knight and save the situation, sometimes it cannot be done. >> hang on a second. you can't -- you know, there's all of these platitude news announcements like i wish we could do more and we could do more and this is their fight, yes, the war on the european continent was their fight and we did something and they were were remade in a image and guess what, it looks a lot like the image of the victors. the truth is things can be done. we are the united states of america. yes, it's true. it's not libya. on the other hand it's not the

associate yet union either. we have guided munitions. we can enforce a no-fly zone. we can do it without substantial. we can do it. we don't have the will and the syrian woman romney quoted knows it. it doesn't matter how many time use pronounce we wish we could doing? >> there is a civil war. >> there is a war. 30,000 plus people who are dead. >> you have to -- >> you can't stand aside. >> let me ask one more question about china and american leadership in responding to a request from the vietnamese and to a certain extent other countries. do you think the united states is inevitably going to play some kind of a role in balancing? >> the simple answer, yes. the world's most important relationship is with the world's greatest power and the world's

greatest emerging power is the united states. the greatest emerging power is china. there will have to be a balancing force as a result of the political competition and certainly by the way that pivot whatever you may call it is welcomed in many countries because they'd rather see a balance with u.s. and china than any two or three doing it on their own. the biggest story about the u.s./china relationship is how both sides are ma nushing each other, positioning each other to avoid any kind of condition and that is good. >> were you surprised romney dropped what had been a staple of his peaches which was kind of a china bashing paragraph? >> i was relieved. i think the worth part of the romney campaign is the ceaseless and i think very feckless and ultimately dangerous china bashing. we want china as a rising economic power and as a responsible political player and i hope that this is an

indication that romney at some level beyond the purely political and beyond the politics in ohio understands this. >> on that note, brett stephens, danielle, victory, bill, pleasure to have you all on. up next, what in the world. the case for a new public policy in america. aisle explain. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 let's talk about low-cost investing. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 at schwab, we're committed to offering you tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 low-cost investment options-- tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 like our exchange traded funds, or etfs tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 which now have the lowest tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 operating expenses tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 in their respective tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 lipper categories. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 lower than spdr tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 and even lower than vanguard. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 that means with schwab, tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 your portfolio has tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 a better chance to grow. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 and you can trade all our etfs online, tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 commission-free, from your schwab account. tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 so let's talk about saving money, tdd#: 1-800-345-2550 with schwab etfs.

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now for our "what in the world" segment. the summer holiday season is winding down, but last monday americans got to enjoy one last hurrah, a federal holiday, columbus day. it got me thinking about the economy. can we afford all these days off and how does america compare with the rest of the country?

they rank countries. the data confirms a number of commonly held stereotypes and there are a few surprises. take a look. top of the list is united kingdom with 28 statutory holidays. nine of the top ten countries are, of course, in europe who live adulce vida. scroll down further and the list continues to be dominated by european countries. 20 days off for the germans, irish and italians, then come a bunch of latin american countries and the asian wings, hong kong, and singapore and where is the u.s.? dead last. zero statutory holidays. that's because federal holiday does not mandate paid time for work. americans are allowed 15 working days off a year. pretty close to the bottom of the list. what's more, only about half of

the americans take their full vacation off. europeans once again have no such qualms, but let's go back to columbus day. these are days when government offices and banks are closed and so businesses have an incentive to follow suit, but even on those, the u.s. lags behind. top of the list are india with 16 public holidays and colombia with 18. but argentina has climbed even higher after mersa survey was published. it now has 19 public holidays. they, too, had last monday off. they don't call it columbus day. it's called day of respect for cultural diversity. these holidays have increased by seven full days since president cristina kirchner took office in 2007. a 60% jump. the logic here isn't to keep

people happy. it's pointed out domestic tours during the long weekends have increased by 40% this year. more than 800,000 people traveled around the country last weekend, spend 1g $30 million. so how's that for a paradox. holidays that boost growth. in fact, it's a trade-off. the boost to tourism versus a decline in ooe economic activity but countries also have to juggle political and cultural sensitivities. i work hard but i like holidays. i think you get a chance to recharge and americans should. worry about taking some time off. look around the world. we are not slackers. more important, most of our growth is fueled not by long hours but by innovation, productivity, education, and immigration. one final thought, if i had my way i would add one holiday to the u.s. calendar, one which most countries have.

presidential election day. if we did that we would find many americmore americans will part in what should be. we'll be right back. up next it sounded like something out of a movie. now it's a movie. the 1979 hostage crisis in iran. i speak to a cia insider about the new film "argo." many of my patients still clean their dentures with toothpaste. but they have to use special care in keeping the denture clean. dentures are very different to real teeth. they're about 10 times softer and may have surface pores where bacteria can multiply. polident is designed to clean dentures daily.

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washington. "fareed zakaria gps" returns shortly but first a check of the top stories. a new poll shows a tight race to the white house in a. according to a rocky mountain high likely voters obama has a 44% edge over mitt romney. only one has won arizona in the past 60 years. bill clinton in 1996. the romney campaign has a new ad out today featuring joe biden lafrg as his republican challenger congressman paul ryan talks about the struggling economy. the contrasting foot amg was from thursday's vice-presidential debate. a cnn/orc poll shows us. a dangerous and daring effort to break the sky. today felix bottom guarder? is making an attempt to jump from the edge of space. brian todd is here with details.

>> right now they're going through to process of inflating felix baumgartner's balloon. it could take as much as an hour. the launch of the balloon and capsule may not occur for at least another hour. from that point it will take two and half hours to three hours for him to ascend 120 feet above the surface of the earth. if it happened today, it may not happen until mid afternoon or early afternoon eastern time. so he's on the ground waiting for all this to get ready and the launch could come soon, candy. >> an incredible story. thanks so much, brian. cn will, of course, have continuing coverage of this story throughout the day. "reliable sources" is up at the top of the hour but now back to "fareed zakaria gps." everybody knows about the 52 americans who were held hostage for 444 days in tehran after militants stormed the embassy in november 1979. but often forgotten are the

secret six, six other americans working for the government who were not taken hostage that day. and until recently only a handful of people, most with top secret clearances, knew the real story of how those six eventually got out of the country. that fascinatining tale is the basis of a new book and movie both called "argo." >> actions of iran have shocked the civilized world. >> the movie out this weekend was released by warner brothers which has the same parent company as cnn. the master mooipd with the plan to set them free and the co-author of the book antonio mendez is with me now. welcome. >> thank you for inviting me. >> you were the head of the awe thenty indication branch so what did you do. >> a good part of my job was establishing identities. >> basically giving people fake

identities, fake things? >> yes. we had the exfiltrations. i had a staff. we would be working on preparedness worldwide. prepared to handle the person who would knock on your door at moment and say i want to defect. >> this is what i do. i get people out and i've never left anyone behind. >> so the hostages are taken and then there are at least six people who by sheer luck skaps before the militants can get to them, american government employees and their spouses and they go from apartment to apartment and they end up -- they're in a situation where they can't keep moving around. >> what happened? >> six of them went out a back exit. brits turned them away, kiwis turned them away, canadians took them in. >> the canadians rather than

shoed the shoo'd them away said right on, what tyke you so long. >> but they can't stay with the canadian ambassador forever you have to come up with some plan to get them out and so you think of something that's literally out of hollywood. >> i think of hollywood because i had some dealings with hollywood and i trusted them, i knew some really smart people out there. my masters thought it was a little crazy. >> but explain the idea. you decided you were going to try to make these people seem like they had come from hollywood scouting for desert locations. >> yeah, exactly. so rather than hide them in the crowd, we decided to put them up front and center. it's what we call a distraction. we create a misdirection in the operation where they can blend in and be gone. >> so you decide, okay, you're

going to give them some identity that seems real. and you think that people won't wonder -- you're scouting for desert locations and you come to iran with all this turmoil? >> yeah. everybody knows that people from hollywood are a little eccentric and would go anywhere in the world if they had a certain bizarre that they wanted to shoot. >> in order to make this work, you actually have to set up a real production company in hollywood. >> yeah. we had to find real estate on one of the studios out in hollywood. our consultants helped us find real estate and we create add production company that we called studio 6 productions. within a few days we had a movie script, we had a company. the first thing we did is went to hollywood reporter and variety and took out full-page

adds. i designed a poster, "argo" a cosmic conflict. >> you have to go to iran and you play the production manager of this supposed film. >> exactly. and going to tehran is not unusual. we know that the job's going to be done much better if you're on site because the worst thing that can happen is the six amateurs are going to make a mistake and everybody's going to be in trouble. we want to be able to assess their ability to carry it off under pressure, set cetera. >> you go there and talk to them. what is their reaction. now you're telling them for the first time their whole plan? >> yes. it was quite a chunk of information for them to follow. >> what are our chances. >> one of them was a little more intelligent than we were and he was a little hesitant to climb

on board until he did more thinking but we convinced him it would be nice to move quickly. >> tell us what happens then because when we watch movies or read books about these kinds of things, spy thrillers, it always seems that when the plan is actually implemented, things start going wrong. >> that moment of moving through immigration was one of those occurrences where we were not su sure. the eight of us arrived at immigration, put down our authentic looking phony document packages and the immigration guy looked at the pile and he picked it up and he went out to the back room. he said, what see h doing.

he came out stirring a cup of tea. he was taking his tea break. so we were cleared to go into the departure lounge. the immigration checkpoint was -- >> the last area. >> yep. >> when the plane takes off, when the wheels take off, that must have been -- that must have been the moment you felt this has worked. >> yes. we always say there's nothing as lovely as the feeling of wheels up. in this case, we were still in iranian airspace for a while, so everybody was holding their breath until we were out of iran completely, and then we had a celebration. >> so when it happened everyone assumed it was a canadian operation. >> exactly.

that was our goal. >> because you didn't want any reprisals from any further american hostages. >> exactly. >> with you've been a movie fan all your life. what has it been like to have ben affleck play you? >> as i say ben's a nice guy. he's probably not good looking enough to play me but he's dam good director so i was proud to have him on the big screen looking at somebody and saying my name is tony mendez. that was quite a moment. >> tony mendez, a pleasure to have you on. >> thank you. >> we will be back. the civil war had a death toll that would beat even to us today almost unimaginable. 2.5% of the population died in the war. that would be the equivalent of 7 million americans today. questions?

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we rightly mourn the trajing loss of every american soldier who dies in afghanistan, but how to thing about 600,000 americans dead. that toll from the civil war in proportional terms is even more staggering. 1/40th of the population perished. a new pbs film "death and the civil war" described how the war changed. it's based on a book by harvard president drew philbin foust. i had a chance to talk with her and the fill. director rick burns. in the book, one of the things you talk about is the way in which the civil bar changed our conception of sort of nationalism of pate ro tichl. why did it do that. >> it did that based in part on

ensuring the lives of half of the american nation. i think lincoln capture thad so well in the getsyburg address. they had a text toll almost unimaginable. 2.5% of the population died in the war. this would be the equivalent of 7 million americans today. and so when you think about those kinds of fwhirms, i think it reminds you of how people must have had to struggle in order to cope with those deaths. and 1-800-part of that was sim will i the military deaths. what did you do with the bodies? how did you identify them when people didn't have dog tags? how did you have next of kin when there was no system of notification. so there emerges from the war a reburial movement in which after the fighting has ceased in 1865 union troops moved through the south looking for the soldiers looking to protect and honor them. what that finally yields is the national cemetery system with 47

national cemeteries and a national commitment to the lives of those who are lost in the nation's behalf. and so the things we take for granded today only emerged in the course of the civil war and the bureaucracy and commitment of the federal government to those principles is an essential part of the kind of nation that emerged from the civil war. >> at a perj level, you know, the first chapter in your book is called dying and it's about people wanting to die a good death. what i was struck by was that dying of disease or infection was something they feared more than just getting shot straight on. >> there are a lot of ways to die in the civil war. it was kind of a perfect storm in that respect. disease took twice the number of deaths as battlefield wounds but indeed the battlefield deaths were stunning. no one was prepared for that. there had been no war in which you could begin to have the kind of casualties that began to

wracked up. that was horrifying. >> then there was killing. americans killing other americans was that hard for them? >> it went against basic christian principles and most of the nation at that time was christian, and so one finds tracks written by various protestant churches or other kiepsds of public indications convincing individuals that to die for a holy cause is acceptable, to kill for a holy cause is even better. to die is good but to kill is also okay, to reassure people about a just war and the pass that you get on the commandment against killing. >> you saw that. we went into afghanistan, toppled the taliban, but it didn't feel enough for the magnitude of what we had suffered and so you say that was part of what explains the move

into iraq. >> it seems to me that people want meaning and one of the things that happens really by the middle of the war is what are all these deaths for? we have to make sure that we direct them to a purpose that is worthy of a sacrifice. again, lincoln is such an important voice in addressing thegettysburg. they have not died in vain. >> highly resolved the dead shall not have died in vain. and that government of the people by the peep forpeople shall not perish. that is the final last lines. so the gettysburg is leading up to your point. that's the essential point he's making. >> yes. and the fact that you can resight that, that we all know it so well is prove perfect, i think, of the fact of its centrality to our identity as a nation and the secentrality of e

civil war to our identity as a civil nation. >> there has to be some larger meaning. >> yep. too, with the civil war is, of course, the very deep war southerners were in. not having run and having no redepartmentive narrative. no narrative that could make sense of all that carnage. one thing that was driven home forcely by drew's book and translated into the film is how much in our country today that things that happen 150 years ago still directly resonate with issues in the country as you realize it was a section of the country that was robbed and essentially robbed itself permanently of being able to make sense in the lynn conian way that the north had and we'd like to think that the country came back together and lincoln was speaking for everyone. the fact is that those battlefield deaths where the confederate soldiers who died in

camp really never did acquire after the fact the kind of redepartmentive narrative that northerners got. i think it's a discrepancy and discontinuity that america lives with today in all sorts of day. ric burns, diane faust, thank you so much. glad to have you on. >> thank you so much. >> and we will be back.

this week saw joe biden and paul ryan starring in first and only vice-presidential debate of the campaign season and that brings me to my question of the week. you'd better put on your thinking caps. this is a tough one. who wiere the participants in te

first vice-presidential debate ever in history was it a, johns and lodge in 1960, b, agnew and muskie in 1967, c, agnew and shriver in 1962 or d mondale and dole in 1976. stay tuned we'll tell you the correct answer. also remember if you miss or recent jobs special or any specials go to itunes. the audio podcast is free or you can buy the video version at itunes.com/fareed. this week's new book of the week is "the new new deal" by michael green wa grunwald. had president obama read this book he would have been better able to defend his policies with mitt romney. now for a last look, many huj fund managers have reputations

for ordering on a women, fancy cars, planes, and houses but one hedge runner has an today for this almost 4,000 ton argentine sovereign warship. he doesn't have request. it's a court order. ite mess than 200 crew have been ordered held in begghana's poinf tina. why? just a matter of a $1.6 billion debt. the fund went to the ga nan courts to ask them to seize the ship reportedly worth only about $15 million and the court did so. the next problem perhaps how do you convert a warship to a luxury yacht? the correct answer to our gps challenge question was d, the first u.s. vice-presidential debate was only 36 years ago in 1976.